Honor 8 Pro appears on Huawei’s Russian site, coming to Malaysia soon?

Honor has announced the Honor V9 in China some time back, and apparently they will be bringing it to other markets under the name of Honor 8 Pro. Unlike the Honor V8 which would have been a much more plausible “Plus” variant to the Honor 8, the Honor V9 can actually be considered a whole separate model as it shares more in common with this year’s Huawei Mate 9 and P10, sporting vastly improved innards.

The Honor 8 Pro has made its appearance on Huawei’s Russian site. The Honor 8 Pro has been slated to arrive on April 5th, and we have received word from our sources that the device will be here in Malaysia in the second quarter of the year. Now back to why it actually shares more in common with the newer devices from the Chinese smartphone manufacturer. It sports the new Kirin 960, 4GB or 6GB RAM and also a spanking new 5.7″ 1440p display. Instead of offering 32GB and 64GB options, the new device will come with double the memory, offering up to 128GB of memory.

The Honor 8 Pro also goes for an all-metal body instead of the glass-sandwich design the Honor 8 featured. Sadly, the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor lacks the Smart Key functionality that we really liked in the Honor 8. The camera modules seems to be carried over from the Honor 8, the only thing it shares with the Honor 8 aside from its name. You get 12MP monochrome and conventional RGB sensors behind f/2.2 optics here. However the RGB sensor may have received an upgrade from the Honor 8, as even the Honor 6X has a newer IMX386 RGB sensor, versus the IMX286 in the Honor 8. We have also observed that the Honor 8 Pro will have a true hardware monochrome mode, unlike in the Honor 8 where it was just a filter.

The Honor 8 Pro will run EMUI 5.1 based on Android Nougat. Pricing for the Honor 8 Pro has yet to be announced, but based on the pricing in China, we might be looking at somewhere around RM2000. We will definitely update when we receive more news about the Honor 8 Pro.

Pokdepinion: The Honor 8 Pro is definitely a big step up from the Honor 8. In fact, I would go as far as to say it deserves its own name, and not just a suffix. But maybe Honor has bigger plans for the Honor 9?